Healthcare AI solutions tout their ability to identify more at-risk patients and irregularities imperceptible to physicians, all while keeping a human in the loop.
But are there enough humans to handle all this additional demand brought on by AI?
That’s a question healthcare leaders in the United States are grappling with as the technology expands across the industry.
“You don’t want to be, say, implementing something that’s going to scan every patient for a particular disease, which costs you a lot of money if you can’t do anything about it, because you don’t have the appointments downstream to actually manage that,” said Michael Pfeffer, MD, senior vice president and chief information and digital officer of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting in April. “So you have to look at the entire workflow and value chain to see: Is it the right tool to put in?”
As for keeping a human in the loop on AI, Dr. Pfeffer said that’s just not feasible — or even necessary — in every instance. Research is showing that physicians increasingly trust AI and are not going to check every summary and citation the technology makes. Where the human element becomes critical is if, say, AI detects a hospital patient is deteriorating from a lack of fluids — a human clinician then has to administer fluids.
“We’ve been thinking exactly about the same thing, and we hold ‘human in the loop’ as sort of a bulwark for safety,” said Sri Adusumalli, MD, vice president and chief health information officer of Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine, during the panel discussion. “But we know we humans are terrible at vigilance of algorithms and other technology tools. So banking on humans in the loop as that bulwark is not sustainable. Plus, there are not enough humans.”
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Source: Becker's Health IT, 22 May 2026
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